What are the Great Challenges of health and medicine, asks Jay Walker, the curator of TEDMED. While there are hundreds, TEDMED has worked with leading health institutes, think tanks, foundations, and individual experts to identify 50 of the most pressing Great Challenges.

With the sponsorship of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, TEDMED is hosting the Great Challenges Program

because our community is dedicated to sharing cutting-edge ideas and unusual perspectives. TEDMED believes that before America can effectively address its most complex and persistent health issues, we need a broader, richer understanding of these Challenges. Accordingly, the mission of the Great Challenges Program is not to “solve” America’s most confounding health and wellness problems. Instead we seek to provide America and the world with a comprehensive view, incorporating multiple perspectives, that can set the stage for truly effective action.

Delegates and attendees at the local site for TEDMED (The Kennedy Center) as well as those at the remote simulcast sites (like The University of Tennessee Health Science Center), will be able to learn about the 50 proposed Great Challenges and vote for the 20 final Great Challenges.

What is an example of a Great Challenge? Let’s look at Great Challenge #13: Setting R&D Priorities and Allocating Resources. From the TEDMED Great Challenges Overview:

Churchill described democracy as “the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Our current system of allocating government funds for medical R&D priorities is strongly influenced by political factors at times, and is constantly criticized from all sides. Are there better systems to rank medical R&D priorities and if so, what are they and how can they be integrated into America’s public allocation system?

Visit TEDMED’s Great Challenges website to read more about these challenges and to download an overview of the top 50 Great Challenges.

What’s YOUR idea of a Great Challenge of health and medicine?